Saturday, October 22, 2011

Just a quick post to state I made a small patch to the combat page and the Combat Actions. I made a small error in my script that displayed the PAP (Physical Action Points) cost on the MAP (Mental Action Points) cost. This has been corrected and now displays correctly.

My current work is to add rules and melee skills that will cover dual weilding of weapons. These have been written but I am going to test these before uploading.

I have also been thinking about the character creation and specifically about adding a rule to allow players to move ability score around at charcter creation. I am think of a rule that a player can move a total of 10 points from one ability to another ability with a max increase of 5 points in one. This will permit players more freedom to tweak their characters to the build concepts they plan.

I also need to devote some time to a write up on the leveling of a secondary (or more) class than that of first level.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

When I first started working on the Red Ash World Engine, I had a general idea of how I wanted the combat to go and tossed together some general rules that I honestly did not test. Well now I have and I will continue to do so for some time as the rules are expanded and tweaked.

So now I am presenting the new combat rules, fatigue system and a simple preview of a character (on a sheet even) and my combat log. With these I hope to shed some light on how the combat will unfold and provide a richer and more exciting combat experience to the players.

Here we go....

First the characters used in this series of combat testing are two twins; same size, same gear, same skill, same class and level. The idea of this is to test the combat with no unusual advantage to one character or the other. and to expose faults in the system. The combat starts with both of them within melee range and weapons ready.

As the spreadsheet hides some of the information will detail the play-by-play below here and provide some addition information I hope you will find useful. If you are feeling up to it, I hope that some of you will pick up Pete and Steve and roll try the combat out for yourself and let me know what you think.

There can only be one...

First the initiative is set by a roll of a 20 sided die. This determines where in the combat Pete and Steve can begin their attacks. Combat will start with both opponents at weapons reach.

Pete and Steve, being twins, both have 230 life points and 64 PAP. MAP will not be tracked as it will barely get used for this combat.

Pete rolls 11

Steve rolls 2

Round 1, Turn 11

Pete attacks with a Hack Attack (Hack is 2 Chopping attacks and is a full turn action for a +2 attack, -2 defense)

Steve being the defender this turn and having the same melee level as his brother can read the attack and decides to use Avoid for both attacks (note defense actions do not have turn cost)

Pete will go on 12 on the next turn do to the weapon he attacked with and its attack speed modifier.

Round 1, Turn 6

Steve will use the Pierce combat action (Pierce is a .5 turn pierce attack)

Pete is now the defender and can read Steve's attack action just as Steve read his on the previous turn. So now he get to select his defense based on that knowledge and chooses deflect for the bonus it grants to piercing attacks.

Steve gains a counter attack! (Deflect grants a counter attack when the defender scores 12 or more over the attacker. Counter attacks are treated as a surprise attack and so melee level does not grant knowledge of the attackers intent. Attacker can only use a half turn cost attack action for a counter attack.

Steve selects chop (chop is a .5 turn combat action and will use chopping damage on a hit). Steve does not reveal his attack to Pete.

Pete is surprised and goes with Evade as a defensive action. ( a good guess it turns out)

Steve selects knock-down as his attack action (knock-down is currently a Strength Check, but will most like change in the future. It does force the defender to use his strength as well and so comes down to the die roll and strength score. This is a .5 turn action)

Steve takes another 33 points of damage and drops to -27, unconscious and bleeding out at 1 per turn (or 3 rounds and 13 turns). Once his damage reaches the negative of his health (-100) he will be dead.